You're never too young or too old to boost your bone health.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Saving money on hospital visits may be a simple as boosting the amount of money you spend on calcium-rich dairy products. A new report from the government Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has found that rates of hospitalizations due to osteoporosis-related fractures have shot up 55 percent over the past decade, due largely to dietary deficiencies of vital nutrients.

THE DETAILS: According to the report, the number of people with osteoporosis in 2006 reached 10 million. That same year, one million people were hospitalized with problems related to the disease, and roughly 25 percent, 254,000, of those hospitalizations were due to fractures, a rate that has increased 55 percent since 1995. Women accounted for six times more hospitalizations than men, and 90 percent of those admitted were over the age of 65. The most common fractures were stress fractures, followed by injuries to the hips, vertebrae, ribs, and pelvis. All told, these hospitalizations cost hospitals $2.4 billion for what the authors call a preventable and treatable condition.

WHAT IT MEANS: Whether the increasing rates of osteoporosis-related fractures are due to weakened bones or to doctors getting better at detecting them is difficult to know, says Robert Recker, MD, president of the National Osteoporosis Foundation and a professor of medicine at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, NE. "The population is getting older, and this is a disease that increases exponentially as you age," he says. But osteoporosis is also notoriously underdiagnosed, he says. "Numerous different studies have found that only 25 percent of patients admitted with [osteoporosis-related] fractures get treated with osteoporosis medications," he says. This report may suggest that doctors are getting better at linking fractures to their true cause, he says, but it's likely that there were more people with osteoporosis-related fractures in 2006 than the study detected.

Medicare recently announced plans to cut funding for osteoporosis diagnostic and screening tests, Dr. Recker says, which could seriously harm doctors' abilities to diagnose and treat the disease—all the more reason to start now on behaviors that will cut your chances for the disease later in life. "Bone-healthy lifestyles shouldn't wait," he says.